Diamonds And Gold In South Africa

Social sciences.

SOUTHERN AFRICA was once regarded as a worthless jumble of British colonies, Boer republics, and African chiefdoms, a troublesome region of little interest to the outside world. But then prospectors chanced upon the world's richest deposits of diamonds and gold, setting off a titanic struggle between the British and the Boers for control of the region. It culminated in the costliest, bloodiest, and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century, and left the Boer republics devastated. In this gripping history of the turbulent years leading up to the founding of the modern state of South Africa in 1910, Martin Meredith portrays the great wealth and raw power, the deceit, corruption, and racism that lay behind Britain's empire-building in southern Africa. Diamonds, Gold, and War is a tale of high adventure, high fi nance, and high politics that also shows the massive impact of white expansion on indigenous African societies. And it explains the rise of the virulent Afrikaner nationalism that eventually took hold, with repercussions lasting nearly a century.

This fascinating look into the diamond and gold mines of South Africa provides readers with a glimpse into a world of unimaginable wealth. Henry Mitchell's vivid descriptions of the people who mined these valuable resources during the early 20th century are an especially riveting component of this book. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The prize was great -- not just land, but the riches it held, in the form of diamonds and gold. What became a country called South Africa was, until 1910, a vast and untamed land where great fortunes could be made (and lost); where great battles were fought (and lost); and where great men had their reputations forged, or dashed, or sometimes both. Martin Meredith's follow-up to his magisterial THE STATE OF AFRICA is an equally epic new history of the making of South Africa. Covering the extraordinarily eventful four decades leading up to the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, it covers some of the most iconic tales of imperial history. The Zulus at Rorke's Drift; the Jameson Raid; the diamond and gold rushes at Kimberley and Witwatersrand; the Boer wars; the titanic struggle between the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes and his Boer rival, Paul Kruger -- DIAMONDS, GOLD AND WAR brings all of these and more together in a stunningly coherent and compelling narrative. History, somehow, just isn't as colourful any more.

Excerpt from Diamonds and Gold in South Africa Some of the following pages have already appeared in print. The section on the diamond fields, originally written for the Official Handbook of the Cape of Good Hope, ' was issued in pamphlet form at the time of the Kimberley Exhibition of 1892, on which occasion also the paper on the gold fields was delivered as a lecture. It is now published for the first time, and the whole work has been carefully revised and brought up to date, besides being considerably enlarged by the addition of the latest statistics bearing on the two industries, and by a number of articles on points of special interest, which will be found in the Appendix. I take this opportunity of acknow ledging my indebtedness, not only to the gentlemen whose names are affixed to these articles, but also to the managers and secretaries of Companies who have freely placed much valuable information at my disposal; to many old colonists for useful comments and criticism; and, especially, to Mr. John Noble, of Capetown, for a large amount of generous assistance and encouragement. For the rest, I have drawn up a list of the principal authors consulted, to which must be added a whole library of blue-books, and companies' reports, and files of colonial newspapers, too numerous to specify. Though the materials are at hand for doing justice to the subject, yet, in spite of the number of works that have been written on South Africa, it cannot be said that the diamond and gold fields, which form the backbone of the country, have received that attention at the hands of either scientific or imaginative writers which they deserve. To the geologist. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Beyond Gold and Diamonds demonstrates the importance of southern Africa to British literature from the 1880s to the 1920s, from the rise of the systematic exploitation of the region's mineral wealth to the aftermath of World War I. It focuses on fiction by the colonial-born Olive Schreiner, southern Africa's first literary celebrity, as well as by H. Rider Haggard, Gertrude Page, and John Buchan, its most influential authorial informants, British authors who spent significant time in the region and wrote about it as insiders. Tracing the ways in which generic innovation enabled these writers to negotiate cultural and political concerns through a uniquely British South African lens, Melissa Free argues that British South African literature constitutes a distinct field, one that overlaps with but also exists apart from both a national South African literary tradition and a tradition of South African literature in English. The various genres that British South African novelists introduced—the New Woman novel, the female colonial romance, the Rhodesian settler romance, and the modern spy thriller—anticipated metropolitan literary developments while consolidating Britain's sense of its own dominion in a time of increasing opposition.